Intestinal Health and Depression: The Link Explained

I've just been reading some fascinating information about the very real connection between the health of the gut--brain function---and, mental health.  This research puts together some missing pieces as to why we have seen such a significant increase in mood disorders in both adults and children, the past 20 years, at least for me.

Most of us understand that stress causes many and varied symptoms--from inability to sleep to chronic intestinal problems.  What we haven't realized is how negatively prolonged stress impacts our nervous system.  I did explain some of this in my series about stress and how the sympathetic nervous system reacts when exposed to prolonged periods of emotional stress.  However, we now see that it's the inflammatory changes, affecting our neural circuitry, that affect behavior.  Where are the origins of this imbalance?  The Gut.

How the digestive tract develops in the first few years is vital to our physical and mental health.  A healthy GI population positively influences the neuron function involved in motor control and behavior.  Infants have a bacterium in their gut that mitigates the stress response: bifidobacterium infantis.  If this bacterium is destroyed, the child's stress response will be affected.  The hypothesis is that if the good bacteria in the gut are diminished, the child is set up for anxiety or depression as the years progress because the development of parts of the autonomic nervous system is impeded.  Did you know that the number of prescriptions for depression in children has skyrocketed?  How many children are suffering from hyperactivity and learning disorders?  It appears that the origins of anxiety and mood disorders are systemic inflammation and autoimmune imbalance.

Only in the United States are babies that have ear infections regularly given antibiotics.  European doctors don't prescribe antibiotics to children, as the first course of treatment, because their decades-old studies showed that these infections spontaneously resolved without any medication, just nutritional support.  Antibiotics destroy the good bacteria along with the bad.  We see that destroying the good bacteria in the gut of an infant or young child directly affects their stress response, neural circuitry, their levels of anxiety and even their immune system.  We had a little girl come into our office with the diagnosis of, "failure to thrive."  She had a systemic candida infection, the result of repeated courses of antibiotics for ear infections.  When the yeast infection was corrected, she immediately put on weight and resumed growing.

This research has serious and wide-ranging implications for the health and welfare of our children as well as adults.  There appears to be a correlation between the explosion of anti-depression medication prescriptions and
repeated antibiotic therapy. 

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